The 100 Scents. EARTH SHADES AND RED

The green scent led me to the heated exhalation of the soil, just after the last ice. The earth, where i used to mold my female characters had shades between the fresh meat color and coal black.

The earth is a dark and humid gut populated by colonies of annelids and fluorescent gastropods emanating sweet steams of vanilla and cinnamon, cloves, cumin, baked poppy, saffron and ginger incenses from the Sunday cakes, mixed with the smell of wet brick and the stench of the moist fur… Red was taking shape not through the color of blood but through its vibrations. Blood meant the army of stinging fire ants which would leave sour traces on the skin.

Red was back then, in the earliest fiber of the memory, the overwrought breath of the horses and the irate beat of the orthodox wooden music tools; red would erupt from exhaustion and revulsion; it would emanate in its harrowing shades from the hidden carnage of the newborn cats and from the animal corpses found after attacks of nocturnal predators. The smell of earth and red could be found between the most atrocious stench and the bounty of incenses. It was in the eyes of the dead rats. It was in the madness of the priests. This scent species unifies the ghastly cry to the violent eruption of life.

News The Art of Memory

Silber und Gold

“SILBER UND GOLD”

@The Art of Memory: https://luizamogosanu.com/2d/in-progress/

News The Art of Memory

The Art of Memory

Taxonomy

The last days of the last year i have been taking some time to get through the “Art of Memory” ongoing installation-archive, ongoing inventory of objects and images. During the last year, after several design concept tests and trials, it seemed like a suitable choice the black lid glass container as a “preservation” solution – sort of a direct recourse to a shape and form with functions and aims very much bound to our cultural idea of conservation… There is something visually and tactile pleasing in the plain form, the compact solidity of the glass and the unexpected (playful) convergences between the original purpose of the recipient and its new content.

But there´s also something peculiarly satisfying in the process of preparing/cleaning/altering the jars, covering in opaque black paint the previous lids´patterns and glossy adverts…

The most enjoyable, yet is the sensual exercise of going through the items, touching their skins and selecting, smelling the matter across layers of dust particles and inventing categories, arranging then, the assigned jars to the new section, family, type, level… For now there are named: “tickets”; “notes”; “identification cards”; “silver and golden gifts”; “writing tool gifts”; “Paris goods”.

It comes to mind Walter Benjamin´s “Talk about Book Collecting”, an essay that starts like: “I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am.” and formulates the mechanisms of the relationship between a (book) collector and its obsession (possession) such as:

“Every passion borders the chaotic, but the collector´s passion borders the chaos of memories.” (…) Thus, there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order. Naturally, his existence is tied to many other things as well: to a very mysterious relationship to ownership, something about which we will have more to say later; also a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness—but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate. The most profound enchantment of the collector is the locking of the individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property. The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.” (Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1969; translated by Harry Zohn, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt , pp. 59-67./ p. 60

Enjoy a healthy new year!

TICKETS